Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday December 03, 2002 @10:06AM
from the thats-just-like-your-opinion-man dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to this story, Win2k costs an average of 11%-22% total cost of enterprise. The study showed that the initial investment takes up less than 5% of the total cost. Linux did beat Win2k in one category, Web-serving." Man did this thing get submitted a lot.

Linux costs me anywhere between 1 hour and 5 hours to download an iso of my favorite distro. Win2k costs me 5 minutes to burn a CD-R and 30 cents to buy the blank disc. Overall I would say that since with a minimum wage job I can make 6 dollars in an hour that win2k is by far the better value.

Wonder why Mac OS X was left out of the quotation.Sheesh - it was a FIVE YEAR study and Max OS X hasn't been out that long. Oh wait... neither has Windows 2000. In fact, Windows 2000 will not be supported five years after it's release date.Oh I get it. Windows 2000 doesn't cost anything to support after 5 years, since your forced to upgrade at that time.

I'm a Linux/Unix admin. And one of the things I tell people when I'm interviewing is that being an admin of these kind of machines isn't that difficult because they are reliable, and when there is a problem, the problem usually has a clear solution (ie, good error messages, much much better error messages than windows). Anyway, as far as TCO goes, since admining these boxes isn't that taxing, I can do _other_ things like program. This is something that I have never heard of a MCSE doing.

Btw, I have a part time admin job (3 days a week) of 63 Linux machines, and the other days of the week I help out with another 100+ machines (admined by one person full time, who also programs), as well as supporting a number of lower priority machines.

I have to agree with you and even extend the thought. How many companies really have enough experience with Linux in areas other than web serving to even make a wild hairy-assed guess about admin costs over five years?

How about system recovery? eventualy every peice of hardware is going to take a puke. How hard is Win2K or Linux going to be to recover, have enough actualy crashed to even estimate?

My guess is that as Linux penetrates further into the data center, and there is more experience top-to-bottom in the IT staff that Linux's cost will drop further than Win2K's will because linux will self-administer easier.

Reference: Here [microsoft.com] we read that Mainstream support for windows 2000 servers will end 31 March 2005 That's only 2 years and 4 months from now. I don't remember seeing a 'use before' date on any linux servers. Do you?

Readers might wish to balance this article with the rest of the story, found here [theregister.co.uk].

You get meta-karma, for actually using the word "balance" in the same sentence with a link to the register. I was impressed. If course, it's unbelievably funny, but I was pretty damn impressed at the effort.

On another front, you can get well-balanced news stories here [theonion.com].

I haven't seen a 'use before' date, but Linux distributions get cut off just the same. I've got a box at home running Redhat 5.2 that's no longer being supported. Here's the errata archive [redhat.com] where they recommend upgrading to a supported product.

While Linux (and open source in general) does have the advantage that someone can always support it, that doesn't mean that someone is supporting it -- especially when the package in question has been superceded by a number of later versions. There's always the option of hiring a trained individual to handle watching bug lists and backporting necessary fixes, but the pricetag on that would make Windows mandatory upgrades cheap in comparison.

Given: After a period of time, Linux kernels are no longer supported by the majro distros.
Given: After a period of time, Microsoft operating systems are no longer supported by Microsoft.
Given: Windows 2000 will no longer be supported by Microsoft in about 2-1/2 years.
Given: The study was for five years.

Since the front end costs are greater for Windows 2000, their study claims to show that, over five years, the backend costs (administration) overcome the frontend savings.

Now, shave off the backend by cutting the case study to half the length: the front end costs become a much more significant portion of the TCO. </obvious>

The 2.0 kernel tree is still being maintained. The datestamp for the initial release on kernel.org says "Jun 9 1996." Perhaps Redhat isn't supporting some of their old products, but the software that's running on it probably is.

Also, I think it's somewhat less of a problem in the Linux world. After all, nobody's charging you for the upgrades. It's still a pain to have to make sure everything works, etc, but at least you can do it for nothing but time.

There's always the option of hiring a trained individual to handle watching bug lists and backporting necessary fixes, but the pricetag on that would make Windows mandatory upgrades cheap in comparison.

No, but go try and find security patches for a Slackware 1.0 system... or anything running the 1.x series of kernels. Good luck!

While the theory is nice, and I'm sure someone will note that the source is available so you can patch it yourself (which is most certainly not true of Windows), the reality is that outdated Linux systems are harder to find patches for than Windows in some cases. Most serious bugs aren't patchable by even above average programmers -- the time involved in learning the code base so you can figure out where the bug is and fix it is usually huge... hell, most programmers have a hard enough time fixing code they wrote 3 months ago, much less someone else's code!

As a case in point, MS is still providing patches to Win98. Trying to find patches for a Linux system 4 years out of date is a daunting task. No, it's not true in every case. But the majority of cases it is true. It's stuff like this that makes CTOs break out in cold sweats when they think about moving to Linux. You can't simply upgrade to the latest version of library X everytime one comes out -- that kills support because they have to test everything before every upgrade to make sure nothing breaks. But if you don't then you run the serious liability of not being able to patch a security hole several months or years down the line. Yeah, theoretically true for other OS's as well, but very few OS's have the level of constant flux that Linux exhibits.

That said, we're slowly moving to Linux here (Redhat specifically), and I couldn't be happier. AIX sucks. SCO sucks even more. But both have better long term support than Linux has shown thus far.

Hmmmm, the included story at theregister.co.uk seems to be word for word the same as a comment I read on/. yesterday. It doesn't surprise me that MS would send a "SWAT" team to head off Open Source installations, and offer to give away licenses to compete, but seeing the same story in two places makes me wonder if it is being copied around and such. Shouldn't there be many different stories with about the same parameters?

Of course, it would be just like MS to give away licenses to Win2K when it will be unsupported in a couple of years. I doubt anyone will be getting any discounts when they are forced to upgrade at that point. With Their differential pricing, they'll probably try to make up the revenue lost giving away the initial licenses.

By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment?

Actually, a corporate environment is more likely to stay with an old operating system than an individual or small business. There are still plenty of companies that are still using NT4 with Novell clients, or even Windows 3.11. Hell, there are still many (inventory, purchasing, etc.) systems that run on mainframe-type unix terminals. Agreed, most companies don't go 5 years without upgrading but there are certainly some that do.

By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment?... Agreed, most companies don't go 5 years without upgrading but there are certainly some that do.

Actaully, I'd say that the majority of medium to large corporations don't upgrade their OS any more frequently than 5 years. In a large company, it can take several years to work out a stable config that will work with older machines and servers during the transition, budget for it, and (the kicker) distribute it to all their employees. Most large companies use every other version of windows (many will likely skip XP and wait for Longhorn or whatever comes next, since 2000 is 'good-enough') since they come out too quickly to keep upgrading. Sure, the developers might need custom Win XP (or linux or anything) workstations, but most users will not know the difference between NT, 2000, and XP. If there are any day-to-day problems they have in NT or 2000, they're already used to dealing with them and aren't desperate for a new version on their workstation.

And companies which depend on their mainframe servers for critical business processing will hardly ever change the system. Taking a chance at diabling their entire operation is just not worth a few more features or faster processing, for most business operations.

Part of the cost of maintenance on the Linux platform is surely regular installation of upgrades which are freely available.
By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment? That means that two years down the road, it's time to pay for a new version. . .

I agree. It's entirely unfair to stretch the TCO out over five years without including the cost of *forced* upgrades [microsoft.com]. And what about cost savings [sun.com] by enabling managers to move to other (open source) tools instead of being 'locked in' to the Microsoft world [microsoft.com] ?

Another job well done the IDC advertising department... Slashdot has better editors.

Still running NT3.51 and 4.0 over here and I have yet to see the gun pointed at me forcing me to upgrade. I still get support from my vendor, and the machines are (surprisingly) running so well that we rarely touch them.

There are tools availabile that let you duplicate a UNIX environment network-wide, so I suspect that IDC ran the numbers for a single system. IIRC, UNIX admins usually end up taking care of more systems due to the remote management capabilities of the OS and as far as I know UNIX still outclasses Windows for remote management. And while you may in fact spend less money on your Windows admin, you do get what you pay for. Any monkey can keep the network up when things are good, but your admins really earn their keep when things are bad. The company I'm at now reduces Windows TCO by letting the employees manage their own machines for the most part and I blame this policy for them getting bitten by Code Red. We experienced about a week of downtime due to that -- the network was pretty much unusable. For the people in just my office, that cost the company in the neighborhood of $20,000 in lost productivity. Somehow I don't think numbers like that make it into TCO studies.

Of course the Windows apologists will point out that Linux has security holes too and they would be right. I do spend a portion of my time trying to make sure my Linux system remains secure. 9 times out of 10 when the security bulletin comes out, apt-get has already fixed the problem. But you know, if I were running Windows here, would I be spending any less time making sure my system was secure? I don't think so. Perhaps that's the difference in pay between the Windows admin and the UNIX admin.

"As a technologist I'm very sceptical to economic calculations. I believe that they can be twisted in any direction."

All too true. I'd like to see the full study this article refers to. It is very easy to manipulate these numbers, and I am sceptical of a few things as well.

For instance they state that downtime represents 23.1% of TCO. When comparing two systems with an (alledged) large difference in reliability/downtime, one would expect the cost of downtime to loom larger for one OS than for the other. Also... Cost of downtime is very hard to estimate and varies a lot between businesses (suppose the corporate webserver goes down: how does this affect a phone company as opposed to, say, Amazon?). If Linux would have a favorable downtime average, one could simply downplay the cost of downtime to fix the numbers.

Likewise for staff cost. Staff cost is very hard to estimate as well, and even looking at existing companies won't help: they'll all have different needs and will staff accordingly. A company using Linux might need much more staff to run their servers than another company using Windows... at first glance. But perhaps the first company is in a business where downtime stop everything, and has plenty of expensive experts to quickly cope with any calamity. The second company might figure that a system availability of 85% is fine, since people can get on for a day or two without server access.

Most TCO figures by themselves are meaningless since many of the parameters are business-specific. You may find that in a particular business, Windows is a cheaper and better solution than Linux, and in other businesses it will be the other way around. Lastly... when a OS vendor starts waving such figures at you, I suggest the Dogbert approach: wave your paw back at them and say "bah".

keep in mind, we had the full $2k/year MSDN subscription for each developer, paid each year, as well as some very experienced staff on hand... MS charged us $150/h to talk to us about a problem that we were pointing out in their CMutex MFC class (a bug they later admitted to) This was back in 1995 or so before MS jumped on the newsgroup bandwagon. At any rate, i wonder if these kinds of fees factored into the TCO?

well the original article was about tco of running linux as a server, and not really aimed at developers.

one thing to not about Free software is that the support base from the community is huge. as a result when you are having problems there are many more resources available for you online than there are for proprietary software. also people developing Free software are more likely to admit bugs and problems with their system than those who close their source to the public.

my own personal expirences have shown that developers in the linux community are more likely to respond to you personally than those from say microsoft. take for example a problem i was having with a network card. i was getting strange errors in syslog and i wasnt sure what they ment. i poked around on the net and i couldnt figure out what was wrong. in a last ditch effort i emailed donald becker [tux.org]. perhaps you've heard of him, he writes most of the linux network interface drivers and he came up with a little clustering concept called beowulf.

well i emailed him with the problem i was having, and do you know what he did? he didn't ask me for money, or a credit card number, or a beer. he emailed me source code for a diagnostic program. i emailed the results back. this continued for a couple hours and eventually we determined that the nic was bad. oh did i mention that he responded to my initial query within an hour?

now i ask you, if i emailed support@microsoft.com and asked them for help with my nic do you think the guy who wrote the network card drivers for windows would respond to me personally within an hour to work out my problem for free? this is the difference between support costs in windows and linux. you might not appreciate them, but i do.

I would think that a research company would want to compare TCOs from a wide range of options to increase the total value of the study. However, this reeks of a targeted result based on an agenda to me.

Five years of Windows 2000? Let's see, if Windows 2000 came out in 1999, then it's been out for 2000, 2001, 2002...that's only three years. So there must be some extrapolation going on here, even if we allow that some of these shops were using a beta version of Win2k a year ahead of release. Then there is the question of hardware costs, since Linux potentially needs less hardware to perform the same jobs. And finally, it'd be nice to know how the 104 shops were picked.

Linux admins are relatively "new". Let me elaborate.You have a previously win32 shop where everyone know how to support win32. You either train or hire someone to support Linux. That is where you incurr the cost. From there, you have one person supporting 1-5 boxes (typically in test deployments) and so your divisor is low, with a high numerator.

What these studies don't do is assume that you have the same size install base of Linux as for Win32. Everyone knows that Linux is more reliable (and having worked in IT as a professional for 7 years, (and still working in it now) that is not heresay) so the same person can support more boxen.

Another problem is that the people who train rather than hire have the problem of unfamiliarity. Just like with any other job, it takes newbies longer to do anything.

Finally, the last reason is because it takes more to be a good Unix admin, and their salaries reflect that fact. But fortuneately, the stability of the boxes more than make up for that fact.

We will never have a proper TCO study unless conversion is 100% with proper support staff. The closest thing would be the migration of Hotmail to Win32. But we all know how that turned out...

A five-year study, by definition, includes data collected over an ACTUAL five-year span. A PROJECTION can include predicted data, but its through the use of these PROJECTIONS that microsoft is able to make any type of argument whatsoever on the TCO front. The trouble is that microsofts projections are always WAY off--take MCSE's for instance. Has anyone ever seen less than five MCSEs handle the workload of a single experienced unix admin? I'm not talking about your typical non-saturated workload--i mean environments where the amount of work to be done is greater than the resources available to do it. That's the only way to really make a comparison.

As for stupid arguments, I'd lean more towards that as a characterization of a TCO study using projected data.

We see a similar effect where I work, an NT box costs us about 30% less to run than a Solaris box.

Why?

There are less mission-critical systems running on NT, so there are less DBAs, less backup, etc. The print server sits in the corner and gets a 3-finger salute if it plays up, so it's cheap to run. The mission-critical boxes, running web servers, databases, etc can't go down, so we have administrators to look after them.

IMNSHO - if we normalized for what each box is doing, Linux and Unix are cheaper to run.

The problem with normalizing the servers is that your non-technical businesspeople are retarded from learning the interdependencies of the systems and the business. The costs, risks, and benefits of any system directly emanate from the impact they have on the operation of the business. Your MBA doesn't really know *any* details about the operation of either the business or the systems or the people that execute those details.

This kind of reporting is just upper-executive grandstanding, trying to reinforce the justification for their astronomical salaries. Look at the numbers. They are designed specifically to make it seem like the proponents of such work are making decisions with consequences that dwarf their salaries. The inferences are drawn from overgeneralized facts, and the conclusions ignore the significance of overlooked factors.

If you do not see the scientific explanation of "how to repeat this study in your situation" it is BULLSHIT!. YMMV: here, it holds just as true as anywhere else! Now what are we paying these jokers for?

MS has done this before, and it only proves true on the $$. They pulled this off with their fight for dominance over Novell and Mac servers, and won. Both competitors were more expensive, true, but each offered unique functionality not available in MS. I still can't stand doing a tape catalog/restore on Windows today, it was so easy on Novell. I know it's not that difficult, but there are just a couple of extra steps in there that make it more time consuming than it needs to be.

When you take into account third party apps that are necessary to get a true useable, functional and secure system from MS, plus the training and high licensing fees, this introductory TCO comes out to BS. Novell or Mac, and Unix hardly ever needed 3rd party products to get them to do what you want. And regardless of the system, books, training, salary - are all going to cost. I mean, do you really want Proxy server as your firewall?

From the article:
Expenditures for managing, maintaining, troubleshooting and restoring the systems operations of a Linux server were, "in almost every case, higher than for systems running Windows 2000," according to the study, titled "Windows 2000 Versus Linux in Enterprise Computing."
Didn't even Microsoft disagree with this statement in those "Linux Vs Windows" docs that were leaked a couple weeks ago?

Without some details it's impossible to tell either what these results were based on or the specific areas where win2k was found superior to linux. I didn't see a reference to the actual study, so there is no way to gauge the validity of the results. There's just no meat to talk about with this marketing blurb dressed up as a news report.

Well, some details are found Here at Eweek [eweek.com]. The study was done by IDC.

The study compared the five-year TCO of Windows 2000 server environments with Linux server environments from multiple Linux vendors at some 100 different North American companies.

"The TCO metrics are described in terms of five-year costs for 100 users. IDC's TCO methodology... takes into account the costs of acquiring and supporting the hardware and software required for each of these specific workloads. Costs are broken out into six categories: hardware, software, staffing, downtime, IT staff training, and outsourcing costs," says the white paper.

You can pretty much bet that Microsoft defined a limited space for the study and let IDC produce a white paper, knowing in advance it would be fodder for press releases. It mostly comes down to management tools for some tasks in which Mickeysoft has GUI tools.

Of course, defining 5 year TCO for an operating system that will not be supported for 5 years is a little silly...

The story mentions that downtime contributes more than 20% of the TCO of a system. With uptimes of months to years for *nix boxes; whereas you are strongly advised to reboot Windows boxes on a regular basis, where is the logic that 23% of the TCO of a *nix box comes from downtime?

We have linux servers at work that have downtime every 6 months for servicing, and then only for a handful of hours. Other than that, they don't come down at all. I fail to see how less than 1 day downtime/year (planned, at that) can contribute 23% of the TCO of the system.

2 sysadms at ~$70k/yr = $140k/yr. $0 for licensing. That would make downtime cost roughly $32k/day (23% of 140k, assuming 24 hrs downtime/yr). If you house something critical, like your CRM system, on 1 machine, and it goes down, I could see that. Then again, that would be your own damn fault for having 0 backup/redundancy.

There's a lot about that article that doesn't add up, and not just the 5 year study on Win 2000...

No... not W95, WinNT 4x. Also, I'm not an admin, but an applications programmer. I am friends with admins on both sides, and even the NT admins admit the *nix guys have it easier, even though the hard core DB apps, web server, bugzilla, etc. all run on *nix. The NT guys deal with desktops, Exchange server, etc. and spend much more time on those, even based on a per machine basis.

I am really sick of reading all this rubbish about the cost comparison between linux/unix and windows.For the sort of work that i do which is scientific based, the applications that we need are not available under windows. So it is impossible to run a cost difference between linux and windows, linux is basically priceless. And I am sure that there are some people that it worksthe other way for as well.

In order to decide what operating system to use, one should first know what one wants to do with their computer and then decide what operating system to use. Cost should not be the deciding factor (although an important one) when choosing an operating system. If an operating system does not do what one needs it to do, then no matter how inexpensive it is, it is just wasted money.

As for training costs while using computers. It has got to the point now where the basic operation of all operating systems are very much the same. Using a browser in linux is almost identical to using it under windows. So it is impossible to say that training costs are substantially different for any operating system.

But I cannot see how they can support the argument except that at the moment, there are simply more Windows administrators and techs out there than there are Linux administrators and techs. What's more, I have encountered people who proudly make statements like "Microsoft Only" as if it were some status symbol or major accomplishment and who won't even go NEAR a machine running anything else as if it were diseased and might infect his mind. (Brings to mind certain flavors of Christianity)

But as there are more Microsoft-supporting professionals and so many of them are still out of work, it stands to reason that the TCO is low over 5 years... except one thing-- will Windows2000 still be supported in 5 years or will their license terms change again encouraging [requiring] upgrades to their latest OS? So yes, MS people are more available and will accept lower pay. Linux people are still more rare and generally expect more pay because we know a bit more... and usually know MS in addition to other OS's pretty well.

You still get what you pay for, for the most part. But the TCO figure is a very subjective thing... and has anyone asked if this was also yet another MS supported study?

is that you don't get ANY points for installing it. You get 1 MS Licensing point for each copy of XP, 5 for MS Office and 10 for 2000 Server. No points at all for Linux. How can it be good for your business if you can't get any points! And levels. When you reach certain numbers of points you get new levels.

I think the new MS licensing agreement was actually a RPG system that fell into the wrong hands.

Part of the lower cost comes from the factor of scale. If you're looking to do some consulting, well Microsoft has a massive and undeniable lead in the number of users- so you start up a business to take advantage of this and offer services for Microsoft software.

But everyone else is doing the same thing, so you have to lower prices and they lower theirs. (This is overall mind you, not pinned down to any two support services) Microsoft products are also quite easy to manage on the whole. Especially since Win2K came rolling in, plus with NT4SP6a you shouldn't have too many major server problems either.

Everywhere you go you can find all sorts of Microsoft camp product support. Once you learn one Microsoft product you are well on your way to knowing another.

Many corporate level packages also come on Microsoft (ERP, etc.) so that gets added into the mix as well - if you want a Linux solution you are really going to have to take the long way around for a lot of this stuff.

Linux is doing quite well, but entry into the Linux world is like running into a brick wall for many. There are far fewer Linux users around and the system is totally different from what most people are used to. There is a staggering amount of things to learn when taking on Linux, kernel recompiles, following the chains of dependancies, all of this takes time to learn and internalize. Most Microsoft type products are a matter of getting the latest service packs.

So there are fewer Linux users and fewer people overall familiar with Linux. The cost of finding someone to help you is going to be higher. Plus, I would argue there is *far* more to learn so you're going to pay the high priced people even more.

This presents a massive total cost barrier for those who would seek to save licensing money by switching to Linux. It is far easier to pay out to a software company for support and pay cheaper mainstream consultants and get things done than it is to start entering this whole new world of OSS. And you'll have to keep paying out more money to expensive consultants and employees to keep up-to-date, even though the initial costs are cheaper.

Then there's all of the little things that Linux can't quite do yet. Incompatibilities with the mainstream software products, pieces of software that just aren't available or which just aren't up to snuff when compared to the MS world. Add these in as indirect costs - even if you get the money to start up with Linux these little niggling issues will make management wonder why they bothered. Finance is not going to be happy without running Excel, the VP is going to be annoyed by not being able to access his IE only stock market site.

On the flip side, if you happen to have employees that known their Linux and know it well, there are definitely benefits to be had. If you want to add a new web server, W2K Adv Server is going to cost you more than the hardware and your Linux-savy employee can probably get an Apache server running nice and easy.

The problem is Linux is just not quite popular enough yet so these gifted people are hard to come by. Trying to insert Linux into a corporate world of Windows raised folk via consultants is going to mean huge dollars - basic stuff that everyone at least sort of knows how to do in Windows may require more consultant hours for instructional purposes.

But, even as the article mentions there are places were Linux is making itself cost effective and useful - like webserving. These tasks should be Linux's thin-end-of-the-wedge. Slowly get Linux in there for these tasks, and then maybe it can take over one more job, then another. Sys Admins can slowly learn more about it and become more experienced. Eventually that TCO is going to balance towards Linux.

There is a long ways to go though - and screaming that all MS users are idiots and they just don't realize how far superior Linux is, is counter-productive. The technical snobbery that often goes on (knee jerk MS bashing, even near-religious fervour found within variations on Linux, newbie bashing, etc.) helps nothing. The rest of the world will just ignore Linux even more and continue on doing their business using MS and closed-source products that they are comfortable with and *that work* as often as not. They *really and truly* don't care what software they use as long as it works, and as long as it is cost-effective to use it. Most business need to use computers, but what computers they use are irrelevant to them. They just need to, well, take care of business.

Find ways that Linux helps them to that in a cost-effective and friendly way and I'm sure more and more business will bite.

And that is exactly how MS will market their products. Wanna web server? No problem, sure linux/freebsd is free, but the staff to support it will end up costing you more in the long run.

You folks act like being easy to use is a _bad_ thing. While the rest of the world thinks it's a good thing.

You call people who install a win2k server for their small business idiots and they're idiots for not mastering unix. But maybe they don't time to learn all that is needed, because they have a business to run, and it is simply cheaper(in the long run) to run a Win2k server than a linux one.

Think about it.

Sometimes it seems like slashdot folks sits in their geek tower and spews insults at all the morons for using MS. Without ever knowing what's really going on in the real world.

BTW, I use linux/freebsd and love them. But i also love computers in general.

Talking with some of my friends who run their own business they are really nervous about going to linux yet they are interested.
I can't give them support and they are afraid that supports costs will be too high, and Jim down the hall is pretty good with Windows so we will just let him do the administration.

Quite frankly, this is non-sense. Let me point out a few flaws in this study:

Its can't possibly be a true study. Windows 2000 is all of 2 years old, not 5 years. So any estimations of 5-year costs on Win2k are based off of 2-year studies and 3-year projections. However, the studies down on Linux used Linux as it was 5 years ago: this is an unfair comparison, comparing a study on Linux's from 1997 up to 2002 with studies & projections of Win2k for 2000-2005.

Invalid/irrelevant comparison. No-one is buying Win2k or Linux from 5 years ago anymore. The best comparison would be between WinXP and the latest release of Debian or Redhat. One should note that the cost of upgrading Linux software is $0 for Debian, and negligible for RedHat (as you only have to buy one license). When upgrading Debian, one doesn't even need to worry about down-time.

Incomplete consideration. This "study" seems to completely ignore the fact that one Linux admin can attend to many Linux workstations, due to some of Linux' powerful tools. Also ignores the fact that with Linux, you can run everything in your company off of one computer, with terminals to that computer located at different physical locations throughout the company. This reduces the point(s) of failure from hundreds to 1. Redundancy can also be implemented if your worried about putting all your eggs in one basket. Other things this study seems to ignore -- like every other study -- is the cost of a BSA lawsuite and the cost of remaining compliant wit the BSA, which can be quite expensive. Let's not forget that Linux can run better on cheaper hardware, allowing you to either save money on hardware, or spend the same amount and get better performance. Yes, Linux admins may be more expensive than Win2k admins -- but because they can administer many systems at once through automated methods, you don't need as many of them. Ref. to IBM's study.

Technical Support. This is one of the greatest atrocities of many proprietary companies like MS: claiming that tech support is cheaper for proprietary products than for FS/OSS products. Bull. The cost of tech-support is built into proprietary products -- its built into the price you pay for the product. It may be hidden, but its still there. That said, with Linux you can purchase useful tech support from a free market, with heavy competition -- that is, you get guys who know what they're doing. As someone who's used MS' tech support, I'll tell u its crap: they've never known anything I didn't know, and have never provided a useful solution to a problem I couldn't solve. Tech support solutions for MS go somewhat like this: (1) Take you through cook-book procedures you've already done; (2) Ask you to uninstall whatever you installed last; (3) If that doesn't work, reinstall OS.

It might be worthwhile noting that real studies, which we can look at, unlike this one, and which aren't backed by MS, show that Linux has a lower TCO:

http://www.cyber.com.au/cyber/about/linux_vs_win do ws_tco_comparison.pdf

One of the common citations that are bandied about is that Linux admins make more than their Windows counterparts. But, the evidence seems to contradict this "wisdom". Most of the Linux admin jobs that I see posted offer lower salaries than comprable Windows admin positions. Surveys [itcertinfo.com], such as this, also indicate that Linux admins are actually paid less than their MCSE counterparts. This naturally begs the question, are Linux admins truely more expensive than the Windows admins?

Another issue is the "difficulty" of administrering Linux, as compared to Windows. While, there are some valid arguements to support this hypothesis, there are also some important details that are seemingly ignored. That is, the difficulty is in fact due to unfamiliarity. Windows admins are unfamiliar with Linux and it is therefore more difficult for them to administer it. But, were these Windows admins born knowing how to administer Windows? Is Windows truely so simple that they can do it without any prior knowledge?

No! The fact is that the Windows admins have had specific training in administering Windows. They have gone to classes, MCSE Boot Camps, seminars all about how to manage Windows. They also have a bookshelf FULL of Windows administration books that they have studied. Now, after all that, Windows is familiar and relatively easy for them to administer. I challenge anyone who makes the difficulty claim to build a bookshelf of equal size to their Windows one. If these people read just as many books on Linux as they have on Windows Administration, they would not find it any more difficult than Windows. This would likely be true even without any Linux classes or Linux Boot Camps.

It has been proven by a legion of CNEs who find Novell no more difficult, in many cases far easier to manage than Windows. Yet The same Windows admins will say that Netware is MUCH harder to manage than Windows.

Also, on the subject of training etc. These TCO reports always factor in the expense of Linux training. However, they do not seem to factor in the cost of Windows training. Let's not forget that the books and the classes and the MCSE boot camps cost a lot of money. Even if that money has already been spent, it must be factored into the TCO. These MCSEs were not born knowing how to administer Windows 2000. It costed thousands of dollars each to raise this generation of MCSEs. In most cases these training courses were paid for by the companies. How can they be simply ignored by the TCO studies? Are these MCSEs going to live forever, or are they going to be replaced by a new generation that will have to aslo be trained at a cost of thousands per head?

You know Microsoft is running scared if it has the nerve to run TCO studies against OSS such as Linux. I wonder if the study took into account the high incidence of crippling worms for Microsoft server OSs? Further, certain things are so much better on Linux/BSD systems such as programs not polluting the OS image and no registry to be a point of failure and source of problems.

It is also a big plus for the Unix variants that they can be easily installed and administered over the network.

Well for nearly 11 years I have been in the fileserver world. I touched lots of file servers. From old ancient LANtastic and Netware 2.15, going through most Novell flavours up to 5.0. For 11 years I worked with, administered, tweaked and crunched so many different file servers that I don't remember all of them. Lots of Novell flavours, OS/2, NFS on Solaris and Linux. I worked also with Windows "solutions", from WfW up to Windows2000 Server. From all these I sincerly prefer Netware. Netware is far better and manageable than any other file server system. Naturally as Novell did it specially for file servers. However there is a problem with Novell. Its prices are prohibitive for many customers. But, if your work highly depends in file server services, surely the TCO is far lower than everyone else.

Among all the systems I used, the most crappy, cumbersome, crash-proned, time consuming and nervestraining was M$ crap. It came up into hanging a whole local network, just because M$ thought it could play at will with TCP/IP stack. But there are tons of stories about the crap. Let's just pick the most recent.

In April this year, I met a medium-sized Compaq server in one highly important organisation. Compaq's dealer sweeted a lot to have that lovely machine there. And sweeted even more to have it working. The thing worked, naturally, on Windows2000 Server. I was asked to tweak the crap so that several problems were gone. And the problems were: workstations loosing connection with the server, Apps frequently hanging up, file transfer working slowly (in a 100mbits network it looked much like 10mbits), and a episodic events with the machine crashing.

After some administration we came up to the conclusion that the machine was going into sure doom. The DNS was crashing every day, WINS and SMB were giving wrong packets into the network, the file system was getting wrong data, user accounts were not freed, CPU never lowered behind 30% and lots of many other problems. Besides we found that, everyday, 30 minutes of workday was lost on backing up data (it was a damn important server) as no one could work while backup was going on.

Well, we created a backup server, curiously on Linux, but with the objective to reinstall Windows2000 on the main server. We lost ONE week trying to do it. As we discovered, the original installer had also huge problems with that machine. The machine was simply unable to work stable with Windows2000.

Considering the pros and cons I decided to use my old weapon The Penguin Dancing Samba, against the huge oposition of many people. However the situation was Hell in Flames and there should be a fast solution. So the bosses agreed the change.

Well I had a whole day of headaches to install it on Compaq's RAID. Also I had lots of trouble creating a secure, stable and automatised environment. In the whole, it took me 2-3 weeks to do all the work.

Today, nearly half-year later, the admin approaches the server 1-2 times in the week. Most work is log checking and some rare tweaks in the configuration (mostly adding users), the machine carries several early warning scripts in case something goes wrong. Backup is completely automatic. With the exception of one single user (some mystic problem), everyone works without hangups, crashes or lost connections. The system lives perfectly in its 100mbps network and the problem of slow connections is forgotten. Besides, the average load of this machine is just 3% and it now carries also a MySQL server that is frequently used and which, in the future, may substitute many file server tasks.

When you purchase and install a Win2K product, you give Microsoft the right to "audit" you. They performed one of these audits on a company I worked for. I am certain we owned all of the software that was on our machines. We had a corporate policy of no piracy, buy what we need.

We just couldn't produce EULAs for 13 out of over 600 products. Their lawyers also wanted $6000 for the MSDN copies we had. These guys don't seem to even understand Microsoft licensing and appear to be trying to squeeze you for every cent. I had to fax the MSDN user agreement stating that MSDN CDs could be freely distributed within the company. It did not seem to matter to the law firm that we could produce the CD covers for the other products. No EULA, no credit. It cost the company $13,000 to settle. The lawyers got 2/3rds of that for their "work". The remaining third went for purchasing software which I feel we already owned.

I felt scammed and violated. This ticked me off so I looked for alternatives. I discovered FreeBSD. I installed SAMBA and had the same fuctionality as a Windows Server without the risk. I had to buy 2 Samba books to figure it out. I had to reinstall FreeBSD multiple times until I figured out how to do it. I can do it now in my sleep. It is not that FreeBSD is harder, it was just unfamiliar.

If you think this is an isolated incident, it is not. Audits happen everyday. Sometimes, the target really deserves the attention, sometimes it is just Microsoft biting a hand that feeds them. Sometimes, Microsoft's lawyers go over board and put the squeeze on a non profit or school and then people squak at Microsoft. Then there are a number of small companies that, unwittingly, find themselves in a bind.

There are alternatives to some of the Microsoft software. I suggest to everyone that will listen to use the alternatives first.

I'm not going to try to defend the notion that a Linux desktop has a lower TCO than a Win 2K desktop, because frankly I doubt that it does. Linux requires admins which, unlike MCSEs, aren't churned out by the dozens by your local community college.

The problem I see here is that most of these Linux vs. Windows TCO studies hinge on the idea that you are replacing a Windows 2000 desktops with a full-fledged Linux desktops, and that's the wrong way to do it.

I'd like to see a unbalanced TCO review of what the City of Largo, Florida has done [kde.org]. Basically, they've got 800 very cheap thin clients (230 concurrent) running X-Windows applications (KDE, etc.) off of a couple big-ass terminal servers. Very similar to the Linux Terminal Server Project [ltsp.org], and very cool.

There are so many businesses paying $200 for Win 2K Pro and $350 for MS Office just so their employees can send email and dabble in Word or Excel. It's insane. They could be saving $550 per machine in software costs alone! Not considering the fact that the thin client hardware costs much, much less than the average desktop. And there's essentially zero administration costs on the clients. Let's see a TCO comparison on that.

I'm starting to get off-topic, but I'm excited about the project so what the hell. I'm currently doing a little in-house pilot of the same thing at my employer. I've customized the KNOPPIX [knoppix.org] bootable ISOs to basically be X-Windows thin clients. You just pop the CD in a machine, reboot, and you get a KDM login box for our terminal server. Very, very cool. Even free server licenses [theregister.co.uk] from Microsoft couldn't persuade me to drop this project.

"Study Finds Windows Cheaper Than Linux (continued)"Many drivers of cost need to be uncovered in such an examination and evaluation, and the 'risk/return' trade-offs of Linux versus Windows may not be as obvious as they appear at first glance," they said.

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The fact that Microsoft paid for the research is likely to be used as a weapon against the findings by some in the Linux community and will also elevate the debate about how valid calculations of total cost of ownership are for any given comparison.

A Microsoft spokesman confirmed to eWEEK that the firm had completely sponsored the White Paper but said that IDC had controlled the methodology, data and findings. IDC analyst Al Gillen agreed, telling eWEEK that the firm undertook a lot of custom research for individual companies and customers."

And Galli also goes into detail about the methodology, so you can have fun picking that apart.

These results are based on a *survey* of businesses, and it reflects what they *think* the 5-year TCO is going to be, so all you guys who are fixated on flaws of the study or that Win2K wasn't available 5-years ago are missing the point.
The point is that this is what the business world believes, not what reality is. You can complain all you want about MS, but I think of it as a good wake-up call: it tells us what the rest of the world is thinking about Linux and points out where we ought to be focusing our efforts.

If you read the article a bit more closly and check the comments for referance, you'll notive the article says that this study was done over a 5 year period of time. Windows 2000 wasn't out 5 years ago making this rather impossible and thus pretty hard to believe. And I can imagine that starting with Linux 5 years ago and using that till now probably would cost more than it would to start now and carry forward 5 uears because so much progress has been made. Were upgrades allowed? This article is very light on the details. Would a service pack be allowed then? Wouldn't this make Linux better because for free, you get better and better upgrades. Win 2000 only gives you a few services paks, unless you upgrade to XP (ha!)

So in the end I am really confused at how this is even possible and sort of able to believe part of it because of the severe age-ness of it. But really. Come on, we need way more detail before I'll actually believe it.

The problem with this kind of study (and I'm also including the ones by IBM that favor Linux over Windows in this) is that there is no general case that you can model results for. All these studies assume too many specific things about the "typical workplace" and "typical server needs" and "typical staff" that are not universal, and then have the hubris to take their conclusion and make the bold public statement that it applies universally. TCO calculations are especially prone to this since TCO depends largely on the staff's ability and willingness to learn the technology, and that's not the same for every situation. For us at work, Windows would be more expensive than Linux simply because we don't like it, and thus would spend the minimum time necessary to learn how to make it work just barely for us.

Microsoft paid good money for that study. If you take it seriously, that just proves your last remaining brain cell has died. The more you dig for details the more ridiculous their claims are. If you want the truth, read the article on the register, and check out the IBM study a this link...
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/RFG-LinuxTCO-vFINAL-Jul 2002.pdf

Firstly, a server license is more than $150. Second, this is a TCO study. You may not agree with it, but you clearly don't even know what TCO means if you just look at the cost to install and configure the OS on a single server.

Considering all the licenses for W2k where I work cost less than one of our tech support guys' salary (and we have several of those guys) the TCO mostly depends on incidental costs from running linux or windows (ie/ if windows requires one competent admin at $60k CAD and linux requires twice as many, which has the lower TCO? But then factor in how much time those admin's are required to patch the servers and it may change - as you can see, it's not a simple thing to calculate!)

I'm no expert on TCO (i'm a programmer/analyst, not a CTO) but you know so little you really shouldn't even be posting on this topic. Shut up and read what some real admins have to say and maybe we'll all learn something:)

How does Linux require more care & feeding? I don't understand, my experience has been the exact opposite. Whenever I patch a Linux box it continues to function properly, similiar maintainence on a W2K server (with a subsequent reboot) invariably leaves me with a new problem. BTW, patches to W2K servers are far more frequent and require longer download times than any Linux patches -- even when a new kernel is required Linux is still faster.

I think Giga has the right perspective here, if you don't know what you're doing of _course_ it's going to require more care & feeding. I'm eager to read this report, there is another MS sponsored study coming out 1Q2003 that should be equally interesting....

The thing they don't seem to mention is the volume of staff needed to admin the two different platforms. I think that 1 MCSE (or equivalent) per 5-7 Win2k servers is probably a common ratio at many companies (that's about what my company works with), while you can have 1 *NIX admin manage 20+ Linux/BSD machines with ease (my group has 5 people managing 96 FreeBSD servers). Many companies don't understand this, they think that if you just *throw* more staff at the issue (untrained staff at that), you are getting an acceptable TCO. One good *NIX admin hardly needs to admin his boxes at all.

Generally these comparisons of number of admins for one type of server based on the OS are nonsensical. The real comparison needs to be focus on what function the server is performing.

Database servers require far less daily change control than File/Print servers. Even less when you consider it's the DBA doing changes, not the server admin.

What if you have one NT admin for every 40 NT servers, but only have one Unix admin for every 4 Unix servers? Isn't that a nonsensical comparison, when the NT boxes are 1U Compaq rack-mounts, but the Unix boxes are HP Superdomes?

And besides, when people talk about administrative functions they are thinking enterprise level. Not your dorm room.

The article says that software costs are only a small percentage of total cost, which is true. They put most of the cost into staffing.

HERE'S WHERE THEY CAN COOK THE NUMBERS: if they say one-admin-per-10-machines, and MS admins are so much cheaper than Unix/Linux admins, then Windows wins. Of course, typically an admin can support many more boxes using *ix than Windows, so the higher cost of the *ix admin is spread out more, so *ix wins (or at least breaks even) vs. Windows.

Is it "easy" to remember wether your burner is E: F: or G: ? Or was that a network share? Or did that change after I put in a harddrive?

Call me crazy, but I feel much better having/dev/hdxy and mountpoints than that mess.

Is it "easy" that you have to install numerous add-on programs to make Windows usable? My Linux distribution came with an Office suite, ICQ, a browser that doesn't suck, image manipulation software and much, much more.

Is is "easy" to edit undocumented and strangely named registry keys? I'll rather be able to make a backup of a config-file and then make changes guided by instructions *IN* the file, not buried inside a 2000-page doorstopper. Of course, usually you will use the GUI tools to change settings, but they don't cover everything, neither in Windows, nor in KDE/Linux.

Is it "easy" to remember when to double-click and when to single-click? For beginners it's harder than it sounds. They will ask why they don't have to double-click icons in toolbars, but do have to double click icons on the desktop, why they have to double-click directories but not links in Explorer. KDE/Linux is A LOT more consistent here. A lot.

Face it, guys: Windows is not that "easy to use" at all. It's just that people have got accostumized with it's problems and think that they are normal.

And BTW: Windows did not build Microsoft's empire. DOS did. And DOS was the most unfriendly OS in existence.

There are only two reasons why DOS/Windows is so widespread: Because it comes with the computer and because of available software

That's it. No other explanations necessary. KDE/Linux beats Windows in every other aspect, including ease of use for true beginners.

Am I the only one who actually thinks the 'unix way' is better? Mount things where they make sense in terms of how your data is partitioned? My second hd in my unix server, which is typically newer, larger drives, is/usr/local and/usr/X11R6 for all the stuff I install. That is the strength of unix in this matter, consistency while being transparent. Fuck, if I wanted/var/var/pkg/var/spool/var/blah could all be on different mount points without the user even knowing unless he explicitly looked.

So don't call bullshit just 'cause you can remember if E or F are your cdwriter or reader. All if means is if I come to your machine, i have to sit there and figure it out by doing directory listings.

At least by doing a mount, or simply going to/mnt/cdrom1/mnt/cdrom2, it's a bit more.. verbose.

Don't get me wrong, I too prefer the mounting system, however when it comes to ease of use the Windows way is just so much better. It is not easier to "mount/cdrom" and type "eject" when in Windows you pop the damn cd in and it will start playing, or when you push the eject button on the CDROM, it actually ejects.

All I am saying is that for the newbie, Windows is the easy way to go. I started out on DOS, went to OS/2, then to 98, 2000, and I now run FreeBSD. However, I would have had one hell of a time going in reverse:)

Well, then my apps need help. A couple of years ago, when I still used Windows for serious tasks, I had to reinstall half a dozen apps because the drive letters changed after a hard-drive installation.

And I need also help, because I have more important things to do than to remember drive letters on all the machines I administer.

Right, and it is easy for beginners to remember how to chmod, sh, and rm without totally fucking things up. I see, I forgot how second nature the command line is to newbies.

Beginners don't need to know that. Even you should know that by now. But it's very nice to be able to send a command line for copy-pasting via email, so yes, the CLI (alongside the GUI) is also great for supporting beginners.

Yea, you are right, the start button, the My Computer, the Control Panel, all very confusing and counter-intuitive. KDE is such a god-send.

I know that you are desperately trying to be ironic here, but yes: The "Control Panel" in Windows is just a directory with apps randomly thrown in, while the KDE-control-center is organized tree-like, which makes it much easier to find what you are looking for.

This is the paradox of computers nowadays. What we have are people who are totally familiar with Windows 95 who honestly believe in their abilities to sit in front of a Windows 2000 / Windows NT (4) server and administrate a network. This is, of course, incorrect. This is the type of situation that works well when everything is going right and nothing is being (drastically) changed, but as soon as something goes wrong; here come the contractors and with them come very large contract fees.

People always tell me about how Linux / UNIX / BSD is so much more difficult to install, administer, update, use, etc. - the problem is, they're talking from a Windows administrator (MCSE) point of view. My typical response to these people has always been along the lines of "Would you want an auto mechanic working on your brain, or a brain surgeon working on your car?"

Before people jump all over me for drawing paralells between the human brain and an internal combustion engine; don't, because I'm not. {smile} Linux and Windows are like night and day in almost every regard, except that they both install on 'computers' of varying architectures.

Long and short of it, companies who hire 'IT Professionals' or people with paper certs of varying degrees are going to have no luck in getting them to administer a UNIX-based network, it's completely obvious. Now, I'm trained and experienced on both Linux/BSD environments and Windows NT/2k environments, so someone like me would be a good candidate (hint, hint all you employers out there!;) ), whereas many people I've worked with over the years who can barely get past a Mandrake/RedHat/Corel/etc.-Ized KDE desktop and are barely aware that such thing as a "shell" or "prompt" even exists would not be, because they run Windows networks in their houses and have no experience outside of the GUI. (Many of them don't even seem to hail from the DOS days, which IMHO is really a strike against them because they're not likely to have any experience in script-automating repetitive maintainance tasks).

Hiring a competent team of *NIX administrators will, in the long run, save a company mega amounts of money, and I'd be willing to stake my livelihood on that. Task automation, machine hardening, strict user access controls, testbed update servers all lead up to an environment that can be controlled very easily by a limited number of staff each with only a single terminal to their name, and mass critical updates can be handled with great ease through the many, many powerful tools offered in a typical UNIX environment.

No, that's a bullshit comparison. The IDC study (yeah, I read it; you should, too, because it brings up some really good points) essentially says that the costs of administration for Linux are often higher than for Windows 2000 Server because Linux is, basically, a lot harder to use. It has nothing to do with the "weld the hood shut" open-source/closed-source argument (which is bullshit in and of itself, but that's another post).

The first comparison was, while still off the mark, more apt: driving an automatic is easier than driving a stick, and Windows 2000 is easier to set up, administer, and use than Linux.

The first comparison was, while still off the mark, more apt: driving an automatic is easier than driving a stick, and Windows 2000 is easier to set up, administer, and use than Linux.

Interesting comparison. I used to live in a densely populated area of Chicago, where parking was a nightmare to say the least. My friends and family used to ask me how I could bear to drive a stick shift car, since "parking is so much harder with a manual".

Well, it did take me about 6 months to learn how to parallel park smoothly. But - once I had learned, it was in fact much easier, because the clutch gives you an added dimension of control as you slip into a tight parking space. I got to the point where I could park the manual in a space 6" (15 cm) longer than the car. No one with an automatic trans could match that.

In my experience it's easier to backup and restore Linux based systems. Fair enough with Windows you can backup the registry hives but that's a lot trickier than just copying a few text files.
When Windows NT/2k/XP won't boot (BSOD on bootup) you're often up a creek without a paddle. At least with Linux you can get the system up with a bootable CD or boot floppy.

Oh that's crap. If windows craps out on booting up there's still a few simple things left to do that usually will solve the problem. The repair consol tool is decent, you can repair installations off the cd, and of course the venerable emergency repair disk. But in a large netowrk enviroment (since you're smart and redirect the folders to the network shares so nothing will be lost in just such a feather numbering eventuallity) you just pop in a floopy have it automatically throw down what ever image it should have, automagically, and let it do everything itself. The person using the computer returns phone calls for a little while, and everything is just as they left it.

And backing up the registry in windows consists of clicking on windows backup then clicking on the box that says system state.

The truth is pretty mundane. Linux and Windows each have their advantages. When you promote one at the expence of the truth, you're no longer a believer you're a zealot.

Using a repair disk isn't quite the same as being able to boot the system proper using a floppy or bootable CD.
In my experience the recovery console is pretty toothless, you can't install much from it. It's handly if the MBR screws up and if you need to disable a service, but other than that it's a joke.
Suppose (for example) you swap your motherboard and the chipsets are different (eg. Intel to VIA). With Windows 2000/XP if you forget to change the IDE driver to the standard IDE controller driver before switching the board you'll find it blue screens when you boot.
With Linux it would just boot and if it didn't you would be able to make a boot disk of some kind with another Linux PC.

Dunno, my experience is a lot different, and I've seen both large Unix and large Windows environments.

Without any fancy tools, administering a large number of Unixy boxes is easy, whereas administering a large number of Windows boxes is hellish.

With fancy tools (which are available for both environments - see Tivoli) you can set things up so that operators can do just about anything as long as nothing breaks. When things go wrong you end up having to revert to the standard admin. tools anyway. Unix is fixable, Windows a nightmare.

The ease of use thing makes windows cheaper on the desktop (which I will concede for the most part) however on a server the ability to fine tune the source is critical for performance and to preven future downtime)

I thought its funny that somehow downtime favors windwos when on a unix box it takes less than two seconds to resart a service and you dont have to reboot after installing an application..

Well, according to my experience, that's wrong - and wrong in all 3 aspects.

Set-up: Win2K is easy to set-up, but so is any modern Linux distribution. I don't see an advantage for neither. Well, maybe a small advantage for Linux because you don't have to install a virus scanner.

Administration: Linux is easer to mantain because it has both GUI-tools and CLI-tools. So for quick-and-dirty administration, you use the GUI-tools, but for automated tasks you use the CLI-tools in a script. Win2K has some CLI-commands, but the basic CLI-tools like grep/awk/sed etc. are missing, so it's not nearly as useful. Also Linux can be easily administered from anywhere and from any OS through SSH. And I didn't even start to talk about the flood of patches and security problems you will have to handle on Windows...

It takes a sysadmin every bit as competent as a good Unix sysadmin to PROPERLY administer a Win2K server and its associated workstations. It's a fallacy that you can hire cheap newbies to run a Windows network. Instead of having the problems fixed, scripts written to have certain things get fixed automatically, you get reboot monkeys.

Unture, it takes fewer highly literate UNIX admins than it does to support windows the day to day needs of a linux system are far less than that of a windows system.

I have been in shos where there are 1.5 window admin FTE's to support 5 friggen servers a terminal an exchange, a domain controller, a file server, and an application server. In that same department we had 3.5 FTE's to support over 50 *NIX servers (and the *NIX servers were hit far more than the windows servers).

I think in general it is, but it would be interesting to see if this was the TCO for one server or ten or one hundred servers? While a unix admin is paid more usually they can support more boxes because a UNIX environment scales better.

I love when a TCO study comes out and people read and article (not reading the TCO itself) and claim victory, the fact is you have to treat one hundred servers differently than you do 5 servers. A TCO is not scale at a linear rate.

You laugh? I worked at a company back in 2000 that put a serious investment into developing a website, with a Windows 2000 back end of course. This was a Fortune 500 company, so of course Microsoft conned them into hiring a bunch of MCSDs to code the thing at some insane price. It ended up costing several million for the whole shebang, which included space at Exodus for a 4 webserver cluster, behind an F5 and dual PIXs, with the database running off two quad Xeon boxen sharing a SAN. This all ran Windows 2000 Advanced Server so they could use the HA clustering functionality.

Anyhow, I worked a later shift, and got to monitor in the evenings. Every evening, without fail, I watched each and every machine in that HA cluster get rebooted =). "Scheduled Maintainance" I imagine.

Don't get me wrong though, this isn't an MS bash. I'm and MCP, RHCE, etc, and use both Windows 2000 on the server and desktop, as well as Linux on the server and desktop. Each has their place.

Maybe when the server hosting this report isnt getting/.ed I'll be able to take a look =). I'll still take it with a grain of salt, as I would any report comapring the TCO of either of these products. Lies, damn lies, and TCO studies indeed.

Reminds me of the last time I read a Microsoft commissioned study in detail.

If I recall correctly, it was NT 4 vs Novell 4. The study came out three years ago. Amusing thing was they disabled several features on the Novell server which were on by default and JUST happen to be necessary for optimized performance. Microsoft had optimized NT4 (things like tcp/ip window size were doubled for example). Things which were not defaults mind you.

The end result? NT wins by a landslide. Never mind that they had to screw the results by messing with the server settings. Basically crippling the Novell server.

I would be VERY surprised if Microsoft EVER did anything that didn't require tampering to get their desired result.

Oh and BTW, 5 year study with win2k? How many of you guys know anyone running win2k that long?